Less-Known Tourist Attraction Discovery Based on Geo-Tagged Photographs

Most existing studies of tourist attraction recommendations have specifically emphasized analyses of popular sites. However, recommending such spots encourages crowds to flock there in large numbers, making tourists feel uncomfortable. Furthermore, some studies have discovered that quite a few tourists dislike crowded destinations and prefer to avoid them. A ready solution is discovery and publicity of less-known tourist attractions. Especially, this study specifically examines discovery of less-known Japanese tourist destinations that are attractive and merit increased visits. Using this approach, crowds can not only be dispersed from popular tourist attractions, but more diverse spots can be provided for travelers to choose from. By analyzing geo-tagged photographs on Flickr, we propose a formula that incorporates different aspects such as image quality assessment (IQA), comment sentiment, and tourist attraction popularity for ranking tourist attractions. We investigate Taiwanese and Japanese people to assess their familiar Japanese cities and remove them from ranking results of tourist attractions. The remaining spots are less-known tourist attractions. As reported from results of verification experiments, most less-known tourist attractions are known by only a few people. They appeal to participants. Additionally, we examined some factors that might affect respondents when they decide whether a spot is attractive to them or not. This study can benefit tourism industries worldwide in the process of discovering potential tourist attractions.